TEACHING ENGLISH GRAMMAR AS A SECOND LANGUAGE USING CORPUS-BASED EXAMPLES FOR INTERMEDIATE ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS

Аннотация

The article covers various information about the necessity of teaching intermediate level students corpus-based examples as well as the ways of how to teach them using COCA. Apart from that, the efficiency of corpus-based examples will be given throughout the article. Key words: language skills, corpus-based pedagogy, corpora, COCA, language atmosphere, higher outcomes, grammar of the register, ELLs, L1. Introduction. Teaching grammar to intermediate level students is considered to be one of the most vital aspects of language skills to be improved. Normally, intermediate learners have the conception on basic rules of parts of speech, articles, prepositions, the main idea of smaller passages. Besides, they are able to comprehend the instructions given due to their level of language proficiency. To achieve success in terms of levelling up and achieving higher outcomes they need grammar rules. Obviously, not similar to children, adults have grammatical conception of using functions correctly, what is appropriate and what is not appropriate (Moskowitz, 1978, p. 92). Apart from that, Folse (2009) noted that grammar plays basic role in learning the language (p. 1). Discussion. A number of teachers of English use various methods in order to teach grammar. Green (2018) pointed out that corpus-based pedagogy maintains the learners’ awareness on differentiating the language structure in the context. Teachers who are using corpus approach and implementing it into language atmosphere must have the conception of effectively using the corpora (Green, 2018). Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is regarded as free online corpora including language samples used to develop classroom lessons. I have chosen the topic Indefinite pronuons in order to present corpus-based examples while teaching. Mostly Intermediate learners partially know about indefinite pronouns, particularly some, any, no and their compounds. Morley (2000) defined indefinite pronouns as “an entity whose identity is not specific”. However, Folse (2009) noted that ELLs have some confusion on using indefinite pronouns (p. 53). Among those pronouns the most commonly used one is 76 ACADEMIC RESEARCH IN MODERN SCIENCE International scientific-online conference some and its compounds. The graphs and screenshots below depict a number of examples with some and its compounds in the context. With the help of the examples a learner will have understanding on how to use this type of pronoun owing to his or her level. To focus on intermediate level students’ grammatical awareness of indefinite pronouns, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) can be used. Once I have registered COCA, I logged in with my e- mail address as well as password. Following this, I wrote the word “SOME” with capital letters. When I clicked on “Find matching strings” the frequency of the word appeared displaying 1685783. 77 ACADEMIC RESEARCH IN MODERN SCIENCE International scientific-online conference In order to collect the data about in which sphere this pronoun is used more frequently, I clicked on the button “Chart” and it showed that SPOKEN ENGLISH is dominant with the usage of this pronoun. With the help of “WORD” search we can get very detailed information about the pronoun “SOME”. As above-mentioned this pronoun is mostly used in spoken English whereas academic field shows its rather less usage. Being aware of the frequency of this pronoun in spoken context, students will have the confidence in using it in spoken English. 78 ACADEMIC RESEARCH IN MODERN SCIENCE International scientific-online conference We can see clusters, related words, concordance lines as well as being distributed into parts of speech with various colours by means of COCA. Green – adjectives, blue – nouns, yellow – verbs, pink – adverbs. Using either related words or synonyms helps ELLs to be provided with expanded vocabulary and it maintains to deal with the word searching problems while writing and speaking. 79 ACADEMIC RESEARCH IN MODERN SCIENCE International scientific-online conference https://www.english-corpora.org/help/changeCorpus.asp Apart from that, there are a great many examples available with the pronoun “SOME” in the top of the screen in “CONTEXT”. For example, “He soon died. I had lost some others, but that was a great friendship and I thought about it a lot”. 80 ACADEMIC RESEARCH IN MODERN SCIENCE International scientific-online conference https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/help/download.asp In the following table there are some examples which have been taken from COCA: № Pronoun Related Example The source of words examples 1 Some some I discuss some of them https://www.english- corpora.org 2 Some some Some entrepreneurs are https://www.english- ready to press “SEND” corpora.org 3 Some somewhere Jupiter is somewhere https://www.english- between two and twelve corpora.org Earth masses 4 Some somebody We must fight! Let https://www.english- somebody else fight. corpora.org 5 Some so